Saturday, 20 October 2012

Dredd

Last weekend I saw the movie Dredd, based on the comic Judge Dredd. In short, Judge Dredd is is set in a world where people are cramped up in mega cities of billions to avoid the radiation and dangers in the wasteland outside the walls. In these cities crime rates are going up to so high levels that a normal justice system cannot work. Therefore, the judges exist. They act as police, judge, jury, and executioner all at once. Even with these judges working the mega cities, crime rates are still so high that they can only ever act on around 6% of the crimes that are called in.

I never did read the comics, but I have seen the previous attempt at a movie (Judge Dredd) with Sylvester Stalone. The previous movie fails terribly at showing a serious Judge Dredd. The reboot though is a very different matter. The violence is very graphical and might not be for the faint of heart, but it portrays correctly a hopeless world on the brink of anarchy just barely held together by law enforcement. I liked how the action scenes most of the time felt plausible, in the sense that Dredd takes logical actions to avoid getting shot instead of just trusting the hero laws of never getting hit in a gun fight.

In the movie there is a drug that slows time down for whoever takes it, and of course this leads to cool action scenes where the victim sees everything happening in slow motion with blood splattering around the screen slowly. It sounds cheesy, but I think it worked very well with the movie. The drug was a big part of the story arc as well, so it made sense in the movie.

I really liked Dredd, and I recommend seeing it if only to see what Judge Dredd really is about. Be aware that it is a very different movie from the last one though (in a very good way)!